Bachmann’s Bounce: The View from Brooklyn

Three men sitting in a bar off Atlantic Avenue. The Lanigan, sporting a new beard, which gives him a vaguely Falstaffian aspect, gets all red-faced and serious-eyed. “Did you see the piece by Nate Silver on the Republican primary field?” he huffs. “He had Michele Bachmann as one of the first-tier candidates. How can he get away with that stuff?”

One of his fellow drinkers doesn’t respond. The other one, a lean bird with crooked teeth, sets down his Pils and offers that he hasn’t seen the Silver post, but he’s not a bit surprised at its contents because Bachmann is obviously a serious contender. “She’s Sarah Palin with an I.Q.,” he avers. “There’s even a bit of Mrs. T. about her.”

Coughing and spluttering into his pint glass, the Lanigan manages to get out a few words like “moron,” “religious,” and “nutcase.” You do know she referred to being gay as enslavement, he says when he catches his breath. Maybe she’s a bit smarter than Palin, but the idea of her winning the nomination is crazy.

Now, if the Lanigan is right about Bachmann’s chances (and most commentators agree with him), Obama’s campaign managers should be trying to build her up, on the grounds that she is unelectable. However, it seems that David Axelrod and the rest of the boys in Chicago, where the Obama 2012 campaign is based, are in the dissident camp. Evidently, they believe Bachmann needs taking down before she gains more momentum.

Why is that? My guess is that, having themselves swept from nowhere to the White House on a wave of public disgust at the Bush Administration, the Obama strategists recognize a potentially dangerous rival. On the face of it, Bachmann is a classic right-wing protest candidate. But in centering her announcement speech on a critique of President Obama’s economic record, and stating baldly that he can be beaten, she was signalling that she intends to be more than that.

To be sure, much of what she says about the economy and many other subjects doesn’t add up. For now, that doesn’t matter much. In courting the grass roots of the Republican Party, she inhabits an alternative universe to the one where many of her critics live: Bible-bashing, Fox News-watching white America, a land where all too many eagerly accept the notion that East Coast élites are busy selling hard-working Americans down the drain for the price of a Wall Street campaign contribution or a hat-tip from George Clooney.

Bachmann’s America has its own values, its own schools (she attended O. W. Coburn School of Law, which was then affiliated with Oklahoma’s Oral Roberts University), and its own version of history—one light on facts and heavy on Apocalypticism. “Americans agree that our country is in peril today and we must act with urgency to save it,” Bachmann said in Waterloo, Iowa, the town of her birth. And she went on: “My voice is part of a movement to take back our country, and now I want to take that voice to the White House.”

From National Socialism to Poujadism to the Tea Party, the suggestion that the motherland needs reclaiming from alien forces has been central to populist right-wing movements. This was clearly what Bachmann was driving at when she commented in 2008 that President Obama “may have anti-American views,” and, even though she’s since expressed the wish she had expressed herself differently, her supporters get the message loud and clear.

Could Bachmann really win the nomination? As a Tea Party supporter, an evangelical Christian, a crusader against gay marriage, a critic of virtually all government programs save the military, and a rabid anti-taxer, she clearly has a message that resonates with several wings of the Republican Party. And with Palin seemingly intent on sitting out the race, Bachmann has the opportunity to become the “not-Mitt” candidate.

The Republican Party’s more moderate supporters (there still are some of them, presumably) and its financial backers will be looking for a leader to beat Obama. This is where Bachmann’s wider appeal, or the lack thereof, will come into play. If she can persuade the Party’s hierarchy of her ability to seduce independents and disgruntled Democrats, the money and mojo could swing in her favor. If she can’t, she will remain a fringe candidate.

So, can Bachmann appeal to folks who aren’t obsessed with God, gays, and taxes? Like many pundits of the bar stool and salaried varieties, I have serious doubts about her ability to make the necessary pivot, and to avoid making major gaffes, but she does have three things in her favor.

She’s a woman.

She’s attractive.

She’s running as a “Reagan Democrat.”

Being female not only sets Bachmann apart from the field, it partially inoculates her against the charge that she’s an extremist. When Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh rave about Obama and the Democrats being godless, anti-American socialists, they come across as what they are: angry middle-aged white men. Bachmann can say equally incendiary things, but coming from the mother of five (and the foster mother of twenty-three) it doesn’t have quite the same impact.

(That is one reason Bachmann reminds me of Mrs. Thatcher. Back in the seventies, when the Iron Lady was blaming the Labour Party for wrecking the U.K. economy and implying that it got its marching orders from Moscow, she packaged this subversive message as homespun common sense familiar to every housewife. Bachmann has the opportunity to position herself in a similar manner. Of course, Mrs. T. wasn’t a religious zealot, and she had much more experience than Bachmann, so the comparison shouldn’t be taken too far.)

Bachmann’s appearance can’t be ignored. In a Republican field that resembles a police lineup for a C.E.O. suspected of embezzling corporate funds, the camera immediately seeks her out, and so does the viewer. At the first debate for Republican candidates, and again today at her campaign announcement, she surpassed expectations. She speaks fluently; she is pretty—but not too pretty; and she has a smile that guarantees her the endorsement of the American Dental Association. In an election that will take place largely on television, such trifles cannot be dismissed.

On matters of substance, she hits Obama where he is weakest, exploiting the widespread (and mistaken) perception that his policies, and the economic philosophy they are based on, have failed. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Bachmann’s speech was her appeal to disgruntled supporters of the opposing party. “I grew up a Democrat,” she said. “My first involvement in politics was working for Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976. But when I saw the direction President Carter took our country, how his big spending liberal majority grew government, weakened our standing in the world, and how they decreased our liberties, I became a Republican. ”

This passage was a straight lift from Ronald Reagan, who was forever saying that the Democratic Party left him rather than vice-versa. It can be no coincidence that Ed Rollins, who masterminded Reagan’s 1984 landslide, recently signed on with Bachmann. At sixty-eight, Rollins is getting on a bit, but he still knows how to run a populist Presidential campaign aimed at swing voters in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

No wonder Obama’s campaign team is paying attention. This woman is potentially a serious threat—to the other Republican candidates, to the Democrats, and to the country.